Industry News Weekly – Issue #129

Supercell has apparently welcomed almost 100 content creators to its headquarters in Helsinki day before launching Brawl Stars and these days is nearly impossible not to stumble upon a couple of articles per day about Supercell. Gameindustry.biz is no exception as they bring in 3-part article series about Supercell:

What happens when you turn a studio upside down – The article covers Supercell’s culture, now famous for its CEO’s approach of “not getting in the way of teams” and referring himself as “the least powerful CEO”. Teams are empowered to make their own decisions (even about what they build and what they kill, etc.)

Supercell’s killed games: Celebrating lessons, not failures – The article focuses on the process of killing games at Supercell. For ten years, the studio has published “only five games” and killed dozens and dozens of them. This story covers how teams decide to kill their own games, what happens with the people in that team and how they focus on celebrating learnings (not failure itself) when sunsetting a project

From forum post to feature update: Supercell’s community connection – This one explains how Supercell grows and nurtures its community of players. Among other ideas, Clash Royale esports efforts have come after listening what community has to say. “When you go through other organizations, you end up with three or four layers of approvals to do anything,” Keienburg said. “But here, we see a cool idea on Reddit, and we implement it. There’s no approval chain – we just do it.

Newzoo about 2019

Newzoo brings this article about its expectations for 2019. Among other things it mentions:

Further growth of games market mainly driven by emerging markets, such as India, fewer game releases in China, further growth of eSports

Increased competition on PC digital games distribution – introduced with Epic Games and Discord entering the field and disrupting ten-year dominance of Steam

Despite the all present media hype about 5G, the technology will only be made available in a few major cities during 2019 so Newzoo says the technology will not pick up until 2020. or later

Breaking down the metagame design in a mobile RPG

Read on this article by Pol Vilaseca and Pietro Guardascione, two senior designers at King. They share their experience from developing Hero, an action RPG game which soft launched back in 2016. but never made it into global launch.

What’s next for hypercasual

Hypercasual was the buzz word of mobile gaming in 2018. But, it should go towards saturation in 2019. This article deals with what’s in store for hypercasual in 2019.

Best mobile game genres of 2018

Mobilefreetoplay and Gamerefinery analyzed top charts on mobile stores to find the best genres. You can read it in the two parts – dealing with top free and top grossing charts.

How Games take the Player through The Hero’s Journey

Rempton Games blog brings an interesting three-piece on how the Hero’s Journey is being used in games:

News around the globe

Ex-Hearthstone devs are making a shiny new Marvel mobile game. They have already raised $30M from NetEase. Given their background, we could maybe expect a Marvel-based, CCG game which is also going to hit China or maybe even be Asia-focused. Details.

Slightly Mad Studios announces plans to release ‘the most powerful console ever built’ by 2022. “What is the Mad Box?” Bell (CEO) said in his tweet. “It’s the most powerful console ever built… It’s literally ‘Mad’… You want 4k, you want VR at 60FPS? You want a full engine for free to develop your games on it? You have it.” More.

Newzoo brings an article about Facebook Instant Games and its market potential. The article points out some encouraging numbers: The platform was launched in closed beta in November 2016, opened to all developers in March 2018. and already has more than 5,000 titles and more than 20B sessions were played. What makes this platform especially interesting, according to Newzoo, is its big growth opportunity and unprecedented accessibility: more than 2B people connected with FB on a monthly level, no downloads required, availability of Instant Games on Facebook.com and Messenger, even on low-end devices and not-so-great Internet connection (through FB Lite), availibility in FB groups (more than 270K groups related to gaming gather around 90M people) and possiblity to monetize through ads. All of this makes Newzoo optimistic about what will be of this platform 10 years from now.

App Store users have spent over $1.5 billion on games and apps between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. App Store has also seen a new record for money spent in a single day with customers cashing out $322 million on January 1. Most popular categories were self-care (someone’s starting to work on their NY resolutions!) and gaming, with Fortnite, PUBG Mobile, Brawl Stars, Asphalt 9 and Monster Strike being the most popular titles. Source.

Epic has announced plans to bring their Epic Games Store to Android later this year. Currently, there are no plans for their store on iOS as it’s in apparent conflict with Apple policy. This news comes right after Ubisoft’s announcement that they are moving away from Steam into a partnership with Epic. First Ubisoft title to be published on Epic Games store will be Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 coming out on March 15. Source.